Monday, June 23, 2014

Staunton, June 23 – Encouraged by
Vladimir Putin’s support for traditional values and convinced that ethnic
Russian nationalism could lead to the disintegration of the Russian Federation,
self-proclaimed Russian conservatives are seeking to promote a supra-national
movement which draws heavily on the ideas of pre-1917 monarchist organizations.

That group explicitly seeks to
distance itself from and oppose ethnic Russian nationalists both because of the
threat such nationalists appear to present and because of the willingness of
some Russian nationalists to cooperate with liberal groups that openly oppose
Vladimir Putin and his policies.

“We consider ourselves the legal
successors of the Russian Assembly, a monarchist organization which existed
before the 1917 revolution,” Anatoly Stepanov, one of its organizers, said. And
he added that the group “will take part “in the elaboration of a state
ideology, for which there is a demand in Russia and about which both the
authorities and society recognize.”

Stepanov’s claim of being an
ideological heir of such pre-revolutionary groups is disturbing because many of
the extreme monarchist and conservative groups at that time were very much
opposed to Russian nationalism but were if anything even more involved with
odious and reactionary ideologists and supportive of anti-Semitism and even
pogroms.

Stepanov added that “in Russia there
cannot be a revolution and a party system” because “in the world there are
[only] two forces: revolution and Russia.”Moreover, in his view, “Russia by its nature is an empire which does not
needto be restored because it has always exited.” What is needed, he said, is
active opposition to those who would import European values like homosexuality.

Another co-founder of the group Rais
Suleymanov, a specialist on Islam for the influential Russian Institute for
Strategic Studies, said that the Russian Assembly like its tsarist-era
predecessors must be multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Although he did not say
so, some of the most notorious members of Black Hundreds groups in pre-1917
Kazan were Muslims.

Stepanov agreed. He said that “the
term ‘Russian’ is deeply dialectical. Russians themselves think of Russians
only on the basis of blood, but abroad, all Rossiyane are called Russians” because
“with them has been preserved the imperial content of this definition” rather
than the narrowly ethnic one promoted by the Bolsheviks.

And he concluded by suggesting that
contemporary Russian nationalists have much in common with Bolsheviks in that
they both talk about “’abstract’” love for Russians but do no love Russians as
such.If the new Russian nationalists
were to come to power, that would lead to consequences similar to what happened
when the Bolsheviks did.

Hence the need, he and others said,
for a conservative movement that will mobilize people not only against liberals
and westernizers but also against Russian nationalists who whether they
understand what they are doing or not are in fact often doing the work of those
they say they oppose.